Butch Cassidy

Robert LeRoy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, was an outlaw of the
American West whose daring exploits made him a legend. Cassidy led the
Wild Bunch, the most successful and well-organized gang in the West. Even
his death has the qualities of a legend, for no one knows for certain when
or how he died.

Born in Beaver, Utah, in 1866, Parker learned to shoot and steal cattle
from a worker on his family's ranch. He borrowed the last name
Cassidy
from this man, and he added
Butch
later while working in a Wyoming butcher shop. Cassidy started out as a
cowboy and rustler stealing horses and cattle. By 1889 he was robbing
banks and trains. He soon joined other outlaws to form the Wild Bunch.
From remote hideouts such as Hole-in-the-Wall in Wyoming, Robbers' Roost
in Utah, and Brown's Hole in Colorado, the gang raided trains and banks
across the West.

Cassidy was in jail in Wyoming from 1894 until 1896. A few years later,
his partner, William Ellsworth Lay, went to prison, and Cassidy teamed up
with Harry Longabaugh, known as the Sundance Kid. With sheriffs and
detectives on their heels and several members of the gang already
arrested, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fled to South America in
1901. They ranched for a few years but then began pulling off robberies in
Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. Detectives claimed that both men died in a
Bolivian shootout in 1909, although some tales put their deaths in Uruguay
in 1911. Others have accepted Cassidy's sister's claim that her brother
returned to the United States around 1925 and died in 1937.